Meld's Bazaar support

[John Arbash Meinel]

Ben Finney wrote:
> John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:
> 
>> Aaron Bentley wrote:
>>> Under that interpretation, it would be easy to write shims to
>>> allow proprietary clients to use GPLed libraries, and distribute
>>> only the shims in source form.
>> Isn't that what the 'nvidia' binary drivers do?
> 
> How is that relevant? The non-free 'nvidia' drivers are considered to
> be illegal to distribute by kernel hackers including Greg
> Kroah-Hartman, and at least Novell has stated they won't distribute
> them for that reason.
> 
> Are you suggesting this is a situation to be emulated with 'bzrlib'?
> 

I wasn't suggesting anything for bzrlib. I was just commenting on
Aaron's specific statement. A large portion of people feel it is legal
to distribute a binary file, and a set of C shims. And if a user choses
to download these, and then compile it to work with a GPL program, it is
not illegal.

It may be illegal to distribute the binaries and source and GPL program
all together. And I'm not strictly advocating for or against it. But I
am commenting that it seems legally possible to do so.


>> And there is no legal issue with me taking GPL code and bundling it
>> into a proprietary program, as long as I don't distribute that
>> program without giving out the source.
> 
> Distribution of the source is insufficient. To satisfy the GPL on a
> work you must distribute the entire derived work (whether in source or
> any other form) under the GPL, or not at all.
> 

I don't completely follow you here. Maybe you are just saying the final
copyright has to be GPL, and not some other license, sure.

>> Certainly you can say there is no problem with me using a GPL
>> library in a program that I have at home, if I never share that
>> program with anyone else. GPL is a distribution and copying license.
> 
> True.
> 

John
=:->

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